


holding on to your soul

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Framework, and should probably get therapy and take a vacation after all this, basically fitz and simmons talk and comfort each other, mentions of aida/framework fitz non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 16:37:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10597959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: Jemma saves Fitz from the Framework, but working through the trauma is going to take much longer.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a drabble based on the Tumblr prompt "things you said that made me feel real," but because of all this Framework angst, it just kept going.  
> Title from "your soul" by Rhodes.

As soon as she’s out of the Framework, Jemma throws up. The effects of being plugged-in and then removed less carefully than ideal causes her stomach to churn and gives her the world’s worst migraine.

She knows she and Daisy are getting off easy. The rest of the team had been rushed to medical before she’d fully regained consciousness and she can sense the fear radiating off of the other remaining agents like a tidal wave.

Jemma is torn between abject terror for the safety of her friends, bone-crushing relief that they’d succeeded after all, and a hollow rage that no one had thought to take her to Fitz before carting him away. As if they didn’t know the sight of him, alive and in the real world, was the only medicine she needed right now.

“Whoa,” Yoyo exclaims, as Jemma pushes herself out of the bed and promptly sinks to the floor. They’d tended to her leg while she’d been under, but it hasn’t healed completely and remains weak from disuse.

Yoyo wraps her arms around Jemma and hauls her back up. “You can’t do this. You need to be careful.”

Jemma shakes her head and then immediately stops as another wave of pain and nausea overwhelms her. “No, I _need_ — _”_

She’s too weak to finish but Yoyo knows and gently perches Jemma back onto the bed. “Let me get a wheelchair.”

When she finally sees him, unconscious again as a cocktail of drugs floods his veins, she panics and can’t calm down until Yoyo helps her settle next to him in the bed. She places her hand over his heart, grounded by the steady beat and _god_ , it’s true, he’s still alive in this world.

“See?” Yoyo says, brushing a comforting hand across her forehead. Jemma inhales deeply, pressing a gentle kiss to Fitz’s chest.

“I’ll be next door,” Yoyo murmurs, and Jemma nods. She knows Yoyo has her own heartache to tend to. She knows that these days will be about reassuring themselves and each other as best they can. When she hears the door shut she takes a moment, and then another, to breathe. Fitz smells different—more medicinal and sterilized—but underneath it all is the aroma of the same body wash he's used since he was sixteen. Here, he is still the Fitz she’s always known.

Of everything, she chooses to focus her mind on that and finally lets herself relax into sleep.

++

Jemma wakes in confusion, water dripping down her face and causing her shirt to cling to her skin. She licks her bottom lip, tastes salt, and barely stops herself from screaming with the unfairness of it all. This wasn’t right. She had _escaped_. She had _saved_ him, saved them both; how is it possible that the ocean came back to reclaim their bodies after all?

She tightens her arms around Fitz, determined to drag him to the surface again, as many times as it takes, forever, when she hears his shuddering breath and realizes he’s crying. She looks up at him, his face turned away from her and tears pooling into the dip of his clavicle, and wants nothing more than to hide him away from the world until she knows she can protect him.

“Fitz,” she says, reaching up and wiping a tear away with her thumb, and her gentle action causes the last of his restraint to break. He sobs and sobs until she wonders how he even has any water left in his body. He brings a hand up to hide his face and she curls around him, sliding a leg between his, slipping her arms underneath his shirt and wanting to cry with the sharp relief at finally feeling his skin against hers.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, even though she knows it’s not really. But he’s here with her now, and wasn’t that all she’d wanted? Perhaps she should have wished for a better artificial world so that waking him up would only mean tending to physical trauma. But she hadn’t known and had received only what she’d begged from the universe and so: “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe, we’re going to be okay.”

He doesn’t speak and she worries that the price for his appearance in her world has been his voice, that AIDA like a cartoon villain has stolen it in exchange for his freedom.

“Oh, Fitz,” she murmurs, kissing his cheek and his neck and finally resting her lips against the pattering of his pulse, somehow stronger than anything else in the room. There is so much to say, and she finds that she can’t say any of it.

++

There is no debrief when she and Fitz are finally released from the hospital. There will be later, of course, but right now everyone is stunned and traumatized and, in Coulson’s case, refusing to leave May’s bedside. May _is_ getting better and she _will_ be okay, but Jemma doesn’t have the heart to encourage him to leave. Not when she’s been in the exact same position. Not when she knows sometimes the only possible cure is sitting in the same room with the person you love and refusing to let go.

Jemma leads Fitz back to their bunk and tucks him into bed. She wonders if he’s seeing their room with new eyes; it’s small and has the same layout as every other couples’ room in the base, but she thought they’d done a decent job of turning it into a home. Now, she sees how small and dark it is compared to his penthouse in the Framework.

She shakes these thoughts from her head as she pulls her pajamas from the dresser. Fitz doesn’t care about things like that. If his hard and closed-off expression when she’d gasped at the opulence had been any indication, his Framework version didn’t much care for it either.

Fitz has spoken exactly five words to her; she’s memorized and counted them all. _Jemma. Please. Don’t leave me._

She thought maybe he would say something once they were back in the privacy of their room, but he’s still silent. It feels so wrong. Fitz has never been this silent, not since—

And he’s not jittery. There’s no nervous energy thrumming through his veins. He hasn’t even cried since that first night in his hospital room; he’s just been so unbelievably numb. His LMD more closely resembled the Fitz she knew than the man lying in their bed, and she hates herself for the thought. Of course this is her Fitz, and she knows both of them will be dealing with the trauma for a long time, but she can’t help the desperation clawing at her lungs. Jemma has never been second-best at anything in her life, and her inability to heal him and herself on an impossible timeline is killing her.

She turns out the light and slides into bed next to him. He grabs for her hand and she nestles against his chest. At least he’s touching her again. In the hospital, he had seen the bruising around her neck and without her saying a word he had known. He hadn’t touched her for days after that, and if he’d had any real energy might not even have let her hold onto him.

“What hurts the most?” she asks him, tilting her head so she can make out his profile in the darkness.

“What?” His voice is hoarse from disuse and perhaps disbelief at her question. _Six words_ , she thinks. _That counts as a victory._

“I don’t know how to start this healing process,” she says, fisting her fingers into his shirt and blinking back the sting of tears. “Maybe it’s beyond us. No, it’s definitely beyond us. We need counseling or something.”

He doesn’t reply and she sighs. “I still think it would be good for us to address what happened. Talk about it.” She doesn’t tell him that really she’s just desperate to know what he’s thinking. Or, more honestly, that after what feels like a lifetime apart she aches for his voice. And she’s realized that Fitz is not in a position to whisper platitudes, so this might be the only way she has of reaching him.

“I’m scared, too,” she tells him. “And it hurts so much, but I think we need to talk about it.” So much time passes that she almost wonders if he’s fallen asleep, but she can feel the tension of his body against hers.

“The things I did,” he finally says, and her own heart breaks with the weight of his sorrow. “Even if I can convince myself it wasn’t real, I still have those memories.”

Jemma places a hand over his heart and holds her breath until he rests his own on top of hers. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. She senses in his hesitance something dark and painful and so she waits, brushing a light kiss against his cheek. He swallows audibly.

“AIDA,” he chokes out, and she feels a shiver run through his body into hers. He turns his face away from her and her whole soul aches with the misery of it. “When we...when you and I were—” He cuts himself off and licks his dry lips.

“In my bunk, researching Hive. When we—that moment, I _knew_. No matter what happened between us, even if you didn’t want a relationship, I knew you would be the last person I ever kissed. I _knew_ you were it for me and now I have these _images_ in my head and I’m trying so hard but—”

He brings his hands up to scrub at his face, as if he can reach through to his own brain and bleach out the picture of being with anyone besides Jemma.

Tears drop onto his arm from where she hovers over him, and she wonders when she started crying. “Fitz,” she whispers. “You know that isn’t your fault, right? She took away your choice and she altered your brain. She—” she can’t say the word because she knows that right now it will only devastate him.

“But I still…”

“No,” she says firmly. “You didn’t. _She_ did.” Jemma gently takes his hands in her own and pulls them away from his face. It’s so dark but she can see his eyes clearly; they’ve always been able to soak up all the light and blind her with their beauty.

“And about the...images. It will get better. I know this isn’t the same thing at all, but…” She pauses, unsure if she should continue, needing him to understand that she’s not drawing a neat comparison between their traumas. He nods, ever so slightly, and she sighs. “When I was on Maveth, I thought about you all the time. Maybe it was ridiculous and jumping ahead of myself since we hadn’t even had dinner, but I really believed you would find me and we would just...be together. _Really_ together. When you found me, Fitz, I was so ashamed. Of losing hope and of what I’d done. I couldn’t even imagine being with you, like that, because I felt sick about…” She closes her eyes against the pounding in her head and feels his breath hitch.

“ _Jemma_ ,” he murmurs. “You know I never blamed you.”

“No, I know,” she says. “But I was so afraid that I couldn’t get over it. That I would see _him_ when all I’d ever wanted was you. But, Fitz, we made so many new memories. It takes time. It takes so much time to heal, and sometimes I still remember things I don’t want to remember but mostly it’s just _you_. It’s always been us, Fitz, me and you, and it’s going to get better eventually.”

She brushes a kiss against his temple and he softens imperceptibly, tugging at her until she’s lying on top of him.

“What about you?” he whispers, clearly unable to continue talking about his own grief anymore. “What hurts the most for you?”

She’d known he’d turn the question around on her, but she finds she can’t distill the swirl of emotions into a coherent answer. _Everything_ , she wants to say, _everything hurts_.

“Your LMD,” she admits, knowing as she says it that it will break his heart but also knowing a lie would wound him more. “Feeling like...as long as it was me and you, together, we could figure anything out. And then it wasn’t. He had your face...your eyes, but it was all wrong.”

He doesn’t say anything, and she knows it’s less that he has nothing to say and more because he still feels he doesn’t have the right to comfort her about this.

“And in the Framework,” she continues, blushing a bit at her uncharacteristically unscientific confession, “I know it’s ridiculous, but the idea that there’s any universe in which we’re not together, in which you don’t love me, that...was painful.” _Painful_ is an understatement. The empty way his eyes had raked over her with no recognition and no emotion still tears at her heart.

“No,” he says hoarsely, holding her tightly against him and shaking his head vehemently. “I know it doesn’t make sense but when I saw you it...I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t know who you were, but you made me feel real. You told me to wake up and for the first time in my entire life, I felt real.”

He laughs then, and the sound is so unexpected she nearly falls off his chest. When she looks down at him, confused, he shakes his head, biting back his smile. “You just, you kind of looked like a bag lady.”

She scoffs indignantly. “I dug myself out of a _mass grave_ , in case you missed that bit.”

He laughs again, and it’s such a weak laugh, but it still loosens the tightness in her chest. “No, I know. I just...you looked ridiculous and you were spouting nonsense and I remember being terrified even though I shouldn’t have been—”

Jemma cuts him off with only a glare, and he quickly amends his statement. “No, you’re right, I definitely should’ve been scared of you. But despite all that, you spoke to me and I felt _real_.”

She can’t help herself then—she leans forward and presses her lips to his, desperate for their first proper kiss since this nightmare began. She’s being so careful because he’s flinched from her more often than not, but he surprises her by reaching up and drawing her more firmly to him, his lips moving against hers in a way that makes her want to cry with happiness.

It’s not quite passionate, but when he gently teases her mouth open she finally, fully feels whole.

“I love you,” she whispers against his lips, when he’s pulled back to take a breath, and even in the darkness she can see his eyes light up.

“Always,” he mumbles, running his fingers through her hair and pulling her back down towards him. “God, _always_.”

It’s not this easy, she knows. There will be countless difficult conversations in their future and probably aching silences that stretch out for far too long. But also, it _is_ this easy. It’s his warm skin against hers and the adoration in his eyes that no one could ever take away. It’s having fought and fought for just this moment and being brave enough to cherish that victory.

It’s finally accepting the reality and knowing it’s better than anything she could ever have imagined.


End file.
